With US public disaffection against a gridlocked Congress at record levels,
Barack Obama looks outside the Washington Beltway to try and force through
his second term agenda

President Barack Obama was to try and inject some much-needed political momentum into his flagging second term on Tuesday night by announcing in his State of the Union address that he would use his executive powers to raise the minimum wage for government contract workers.

The populist gesture - immediately denounced as empty grandstanding by senior Republicans - was offered by aides as a signal of Mr Obama’s determination to kick back against political gridlock in Washington and boost his own approval ratings, now at historic lows.

Hours before Mr Obama was to deliver his annual address, the White House announced that he would sign an executive order raising the minimum wage for federal contract workers from $7.25 (£4.37) to $10.10 (£6.03) in order to “lead by example”.

The decision to go it alone comes after a frustrating year for Mr Obama who used his 2013 State of the Union to urge Congress raise the minimum wage to $9 (£5.43) for all workers, but was blocked by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives which argues the measure would hurt business.

Mr Obama’s executive order, which applies only to new contracts, will affect only a few hundred thousand of 560,000 federal contractors - janitors, food servers and construction workers - who are estimated by the Demos think-tank to be earning less than $12 (£7.23) an hour.

John Boehner, the Republican speaker of the House, said the executive order would affect “absolutely no-one” and warned Mr Obama about over-stepping the limits of his executive authority, promising that Republicans would not allow the president to “trample all over us”.

“This idea that he’s just going to go it alone; I have to remind him we do have a constitution. And the Congress writes the laws, and the President’s job is to execute the laws faithfully. And if he tries to ignore this he’s going to run into a brick wall,” he said.

Although White House aides accept that Mr Obama has little prospect of forcing much of his legislative agenda through Congress, they have promised a “year of action” in a bid to put some fresh wind into a second-term presidency that is looking increasingly becalmed.

Valerie Jarrett, one of Mr Obama’s closest advisers and a personal friend, tried to sound an up-beat note, promising an “optimistic”speech packed with “concrete proposals” that the president would try to enact - if not through Congress - then with the help of “mayors, governors and business leaders”.

“We’re going to do what we can within the President’s own executive power and working throughout the country with those who want to move our country forward,” she said on MSNBC, tapping into the widespread public frustration at divided Washington’s inability to transact business.

Although Mr Obama’s personal ratings are marginally better than those of Congress, eve-of-speech polls reflected the depth of public dissatisfaction as the economic recovery remains slow to impact jobs, wages and consumer confidence.

Some 68 per cent of Americans feel their country is in the same place or worse off than when Mr Obama took office in 2009, compared with 31 percent who find it’s better off, according to an NBC/Wall Street Journal survey published on Tuesday.

Aides said that Mr Obama would seek to dispel some of this gloom by focussing on the need to deliver greater opportunity to middle class America that is struggling to afford the basic tenets of the American dream - housing, healthcare, education, retirement.

He will also take the opportunity to defend his beleaguered healthcare reforms which have suffered from technical glitches and pledge to work with Congress on immigration reform where Republicans have said they are open to passing some piecemeal legislation.